Economic Assessment of L-Shaped Minilouvers for Reducing Cooling Energy and Improving Daylight Condition in Offices: A Simulation Study in Jakarta

Energy consumption is a major sustainability issue. One of the largest portions of energy consumption in buildings comes from cooling. This paper proposes the use of L-shaped minilouvers as shading, which both improve useful daylight illuminance (UDI) and reduce cooling-energy consumption. Jakarta, Indonesia was chosen as the study location since it has driving factors for higher cooling energy, ranging from those of demographic to the environment. An open office was chosen for simulation in Rhinoceros 3D with the Grasshopper, LadyBug, and Honeybee plug-ins, which utilize the EnergyPlus engine. Following the UDI and cooling-energy simulations, surveys were conducted to gather the information of the price of materials for shading and electricity. Savings from cooling energy were compared with the cost of shading application to obtain the simple payback periods. The best shading was provided by L-shaped minilouvers, which can achieve a simple payback period of 0.86 years, reducing cooling-energy consumption by around 18% while improving around 16.78 UDI in comparison with the base case with the average of all the orientations. All simulated L-shaped minilouvers also performed better than the overhang did, which is a more common form of shading in the simulated location.